


He was a Holmes

by viciouslittlewords



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Related, Established Relationship, Established Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, POV John Watson, Post-Reichenbach, Suicidal Thoughts, Unresolved Emotional Tension, boys have feelings, concerned john
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 13:10:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3611271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viciouslittlewords/pseuds/viciouslittlewords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has some pretty complex feelings about Mycroft, okay? </p>
<p>(No, not like that Sherlock, don't be disgusting)</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>John needed to be pulled back from the edge, and the only Holmes left was Mycroft. Post-Reichenbach John angst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He was a Holmes

**Author's Note:**

> I just have some really intense feelings about how if John was suicidal while Sherlock was gone, who was keeping John from doing it? If Mary never existed, and in this case she doesn't, because she just didn't work well enough with my headcanon, who kept John sane enough to still be around when Sherlock came back? 
> 
> For the purposes of this one-shot, it's a couple months after Sherlock returned. Because Mary doesn't exist, and John never moved on, Sherlock and John established their relationship about a month after he returns. This is the first time John has seen Mycroft get upset since then, and the first time he notices that he knows Mycroft enough to know when he's upset. 
> 
> Anyyyyway now that I've word vomited, comments/kudos/constructive criticism are greatly appreciated!! Let me know what you guys think, though I know that my version of Mycroft (who loves his family and has feelings and is a big brother before everything else) isn't necessarily everyone's cup of tea.

John’s hardly listening, staring out the window with his hands clutching loosely at his own elbows, Sherlock and Mycroft having a spat behind him. He only knows something gone wrong when the violin gives a final loud screech before the flat goes deadly silent. He waits a moment: surely they’ll continue.

The silence takes on an edge-y, uncomfortable quality, like someone has just dropped a vase unexpectedly and they’re paused in that split-second aftermath of surprise. John turns as the silence lingers, freezes at the sight of Mycroft looking at Sherlock with something akin to shock, almost betrayal.

It would be untraceable to anyone except those who’ve seen Mycroft vulnerable, those who’ve watched him unpick his careful seams and be less than ice for 5 seconds. John watches as Sherlock registers that he’s genuinely touched a nerve in Mycroft, perhaps crossed a line he didn’t even know existed. He sighs when all Sherlock does is pick up his violin and start the screeching again to cover his confusion.

Mycroft realizes then that he’s been noticed, been seen for a few seconds too many. Quickly sewing up his expression into one of distain, a little jagged and torn, he gives Sherlock one last parting sneer and strides out of Baker Street, umbrella swinging hauntingly at his side.

John glances out the window to the front stoop, Sherlock’s violin acting as a violent score to his brother’s hasty exit. Mycroft walks stiffly out onto the sidewalk, tugging at his jacket harshly in what John knows is an angry, nervous habit. Mycroft pauses and tips his head back, locking eyes with John through the window. They stare at each other for a few moments before Mycroft twitches his umbrella in what is meant to be a goodbye – though John knows Mycroft doesn’t think he knows that – before practically launching himself into the black car idling on the street.

Sherlock finally gives his violin a rest, peers out the window over John’s shoulder, hand resting lightly on John’s waist. “Infuriating asshole,” he mutters as the car rolls away, thumb stroking John’s hip.

“Mhmm.” John draws a swirl through the condensation on the glass. “What did you say?”

Sherlock’s thumb stills, eyes on John’s reflection. “Who says I said anything.”

Sherlock’s gaze narrows considerably as John’s mouth and left eyebrow twitch and when Sherlock entire body goes rigid, hand on John’s hip tightening to an almost unbearable degree, John knows he’s been had.

“Why on earth,” snaps Sherlock, lip curling in disgust “are you concerned about him?”

John reaches behind him before Sherlock can storm off, yanks his arms around him fully so they’re pressed back to chest, clasping at Sherlock’s forearms. He knows Sherlock only allows it because he doesn’t actually want John to have any concern for Mycroft, wants John to explain it all away, but it’s nice to have him close all the same. John takes comfort in any closeness now – he knows what it’s like to live without it.

John hums a little, settles his shoulders back from where they’d crawled up around his ears and tips his head to rest on Sherlock’s bony shoulder. “How much –” he starts “ – what did Mycroft tell you about me? When you were away I mean. 

Sherlock grunts from where he’s buried his nose in John’s hair, huffs out a ticklish breath onto John’s scalp, and shrugs awkwardly. “I…hearing about your life was difficult. We generally did not discuss you.”

John strokes Sherlock’s wrist in comfort and warning. “Okay,” he says roughly, hesitatingly. “Okay…see, I have some complicated feelings toward Mycroft now and –”

He cuts off as Sherlock’s body twitches violently against his, glancing up to see Sherlock’s face twisted in horror and going just a little bit green. “Oh, god, Sherlock, ew.” John wrinkles his nose. “Don’t be crude. No, not like that. 

Sherlock scans his expression, is apparently satisfied by whatever he sees: colour rushes back into his face as he slips his hands under John’s shirt to stroke at his stomach, as if he can erase the thought of Mycroft touching John by rubbing himself all over John instead.

John’s breath quickens a little but he doesn’t stop Sherlock from stroking softly at the soft pouch gathering just beneath his belly button. It’s not embarrassing when it’s Sherlock, who, John is reasonably sure, would still want to suck him off even if he gained a hundred pounds, let alone collected a small few friends from relief meals at Angelo’s. He hasn’t eaten this good this frequently in three years. Sherlock knew the best restaurants in the city, John never bothered to remember them, and without Sherlock, even food had seemed rather pointless.

He brings himself back to the moment: this is important. Sherlock should know.

“What I mean is that – I just, it’s complicated, okay? It’s bloody complicated.” He doesn’t know how to explain this. How do you explain three years of someone you hated keeping you from doing something that would ruin everything, even though they’d taken all you cared for from you but were also trying to give it back to you, all at the same time? It sounds so unbearable convoluted, confusing, all laid out like that.

Sherlock smacks a wet kiss behind John’s ear, noses at his neck in comfort. “Complicated how?” he asks, voice rough and wary. He’s wondering is he really wants to know, if he’d rather John just keep it to himself. Sherlock’s like that sometimes, wary when it comes to discomfort. For all he shouts others secrets to the world, when it comes to John and Sherlock, he believes some things are better left unsaid, buried, or deleted entirely. Some things are just too much, too painful, would only add to Sherlock’s endless stream of consciousness. He won’t ask him to stop though: when it comes to John, he always wants to know if John wants to tell. In the end, he wants to know even if John doesn’t want to tell. Even if it’s something that can’t be deleted.

John doesn’t know why he’s so afraid to tell Sherlock this. Doesn’t know why it makes something deep in him curl up and go cold in shame. He can sense the same darkness in Sherlock some days, knows Sherlock will understand because Sherlock too has looked at edge and thought – _maybe, just maybe_ , only to pull back at the final second.

John opens his mouth to explain in metaphor, thinking it’ll be easier to just let Sherlock connect the dots himself, before he remembers that Sherlock _really did_ jump off a building and for all intents and purposes _really did_ die, so perhaps a jumping-suicide metaphor isn’t exactly in good taste. Plus, straightforward works best with Sherlock, anyway.

“I spent a long time…” John sucks in a nervous breath, “I hated your brother for a very long time, both before and after you were gone, partially because I already chose my side a long time ago,” John squeezes Sherlock’s wrist in memory of a gun in his hand and a cabby shot through glass, “and partially because if I could blame anyone for your death besides me, it was him.”

He can feel Sherlock’s Adam’s apple bobbling against the side of his head as he swallows loudly, but John pushes onward; if he doesn’t explain now, it’ll just turn into one more unsaid thing between them. John thinks of Sherlock’s mouth on his just after he returned, warm and chapped and so lovely that his insides had felt like livewire, and he refuses to let anything else go as unsaid for as long as that did. He won’t let silly things like Mycroft Holmes come between them, not now.

“But he’s also a Holmes, Sherlock. And imagine that…even after everything he was a _Holmes_. And he’s just enough like you that even when I hated him, I couldn’t ever really _hate_ him. Think if I died –” Sherlock makes a pained noise of protest and John rolls his eyes, says sharply, “it’s hypothetical, I’ve never made you endure the real thing.”

Sherlock sighs in acceptance, offering no apology but to breath a little more forcefully into John’s hair.

John’s mouth twists in anger, and he allows himself a moment to be cruel. “ _Think_ if I died, how lonely, how terrible, and the only person left to prove I existed at all is Harry. She can be horrible, but she looks like me, talks like me, has some of my mannerism, and she’s hanging around all the time, reminding you that I’m fucking dead, I’m gone and you’re alone –”

“Alright, alright,” Sherlock whispers, voice low. “Yes, alright, stop.”

John relents. “He was a Holmes. He might be Mycroft, but he tilts his head in the same way you do sometimes.” He shrugs a little helplessly. “I don’t know. It was complicated and I was so…I wasn’t me then. I was someone else entirely, somewhere else entirely. And even when I told him to stop bugging me, to leave me the hell alone or I would _kill_ him, he just kept skulking back around. Every time, it was like he _knew_. He was probably spying on me.”

“Knew what?” Sherlock is whispering into the skin at the back of John’s neck, slow and scared and like he already knows but won’t believe him unless John says it. 

He says it. He has no choice. It’s not a lie, and just like John can sense darkness in Sherlock, Sherlock can sense deadness in John. It’s what consulting detective do, after all. Deal with the dead. John certainly hadn’t been truly alive during those three years. 

“Knew I was going to kill myself if they left me alone too long.”

John flashes back to many nights drunk out of his mind on the sofa, the blurry memory of Mycroft being the one to pluck the bottle of whatever it was that night from his hand disconcerting even now. But it was Mycroft, the most stoic, smug, unfeeling person John knew who thrust his drunk, at times vomit covered, ass in the shower and tucked him into bed. It was Mycroft who was there the next morning, suit a little wrinkled, sleeves pushed up past his elbows as he handed John paracetamol and water – he'd had never seen Mycroft so exposed before, he seemed somehow less imposing, more human, more _Sherlock_ in his rumpled suit, hands swinging at his sides as he deduced John silently.

Sherlock is making a low, painful keening sound and John turns in his arms to hug him properly, to let him run his hands desperately up and down his back as he murmurs nonsensically into John’s collarbone.

“I’m alright, it’s fine. I’m fine, really, I’m sorry.” John says, strokes Sherlock’s sides, refusing to continue until Sherlock settles under his attention.

It is terrifying, John knows, to understand how another person can effect you so easily, ruin you so completely, without consulting you at all. He empathizes with Sherlock, he really does, even if the arsehole actually did it to him, and John’s only speaking in could-have-beens.

He hesitates one last moment before continuing, whispers now instead of speaking, a little afraid of these memories, of how gone he’d been, how easily emptied Sherlock’s death had left him. “It was like every time I started looking at the gun too longingly, Sherlock, he knew, or if I stood to long staring down at the Thames he’d show up. He read my mind, read me the same way you can, and having that…having him continue to forcibly pull me back from doing something so stupid again and again, well it – that sort of thing changes you.

It was like…I can’t describe it. I don’t know. It’s like I hated him because I blamed him for having a hand in your death, but then he kept coming ‘round and it started to feel like some weird – not like we were even, no, we couldn’t be even, but like I owed him, too, in some way, even if he was the reason I wanted to die in the first place. Does that make sense?” John sighs. “It probably doesn’t make sense. Sorry. It was really confusing and messy. _I_ was confusing and messy then, but, you know, I thought maybe he was, too. And when I didn’t want to kill myself so much anymore, I thought him and I could be, not allies, but maybe not enemies either. I thought he missed you, too. That I was for him, what he was for me: proof that you existed." 

John takes a break for a moment, lets Sherlock’s warm hands on his shoulder blades and the pointy chin poking into the crown of his head anchor him. It’s getting easier at least, this talking business. They’re better now than they used to be, or perhaps he’s just more willing to try than before, in some twisted hope that if he’s honest enough, if he tries hard enough, Sherlock will never leave him behind again, will never get bored of him.

John’s not counting on it, though. He’s learned his lesson: Sherlock Holmes is not a sure thing, even if he acts like he is. He’ll leave John is a split second, if he thinks it’s the only way. Sherlock’s way, or the highway, and John can’t even blame him for it; you can’t blame someone for saving your life, even if it caused you extraordinary amounts of pain.

He huffs a small breathe through his nose, clears his throat. “Anyway. It was difficult then, when you came back. Because we’d spent quite a bit of time together, not necessarily enjoyable, really, but when you came back it – that time he spent with me took on an entirely new meaning.”

John remembers Mycroft’s determined expression when he’d visit John on a danger night and how they spent enough time together that their silences were no longer strained. How one time, he’d said something that made Mycroft’s mouth curl up for a split second, and how much he’d looked like Sherlock, and how John thought that he could trust Mycroft this time, even if he could never be Sherlock – he was still a Holmes, and that was something, at least.

“I felt…blindsided. Like every part of my grief, and my recovery, and the hand you both had in it was a _lie_. So many lies, Sherlock, and to me –” Sherlock’s body goes so tense against his, the beat of his heart and his stuttered breath seeming to whisper _guilty, guilty, guilty, sorry, sorry, sorry_  and suddenly it seems crucial to make him laugh. “Don’t you both know better than to lie to someone with diagnosed trust issues? Hm?" John pokes Sherlock in the side teasingly. "What kind of geniuses are stupid enough to try to blindside someone who probably suffers from latent PTSD and has a history of violence and aggression? Bloody idiots, that’s what.” John wriggles his fingers until Sherlock giggles and swats at the back of his head.

“Stop it, John!” He laughs, and if it sounds a little wet, John pretends not to hear.

He hugs Sherlock tightly, presses a kiss to the underside of his jaw. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s all messed up now, because I felt like him and I were letting each other wallow but he was just really making sure I was still here for you to come back to. But I still feel like I owe him for doing that, even if it was under false pretenses.” John shrugs, shakes his head ruefully. “I never did understand why he was so insistent that I stick around – he called it that too, ‘sticking around’, like he wanted me to stay for Sunday roast or something, god. Guess I know why, at least.”

John pulls back to stroke Sherlock’s face, thumbs tingling pleasantly against the rough places were Sherlock’s stubble is starting to grow in. “I’m not sure I’m going to feel any less complicated towards him for a while. I’m sorry if that’s weird for you. It’s weird for me.”

Sherlock leans in and kisses John gently for a long while, mouth wet and comforting. Pulling back, he rests his lips against John’s brow, and whispers “I am sorry, John, for the pain I have caused you.” John swallows noisily at that: Sherlock apologizing, even when John wants him to, always makes him seem so much more breakable than normal.

“However weird it may be, it seems I owe him multiple debts.” Sherlock hums wearily. “You are mine, it is unquestionable, inevitable, and I will not give you up to anyone… but if he is the reason you’re here, John, then you are more than entitled to your feelings. If you needed to – if he needed to borrow you, every once in a while, I could hardly object.”

John’s heart breaks a little with how devastated Sherlock sounds by that, his (false) belief that his right to object is no longer infallible, unquestioned. 

“Hey, now, c’mon” John says, kisses him quickly, tries to infuse confidence and security and claim into it. “Let’s not get carried away, hm? It’s hardly come to a custody agreement stage, good lord. I just don’t viscerally hate him, yeah? I just may feel…a smidge of concern for him now and then. Repay my debt.”

Sherlock does not look necessarily appeased, but he no longer looks like he’s staring in the face of a betrayal, so John’s counting it as a win. Speaking of betrayal…

“So,” John says, raising his eyebrows imploringly. “What was it you said to him?”

Sherlock looks uncomfortable. “Ah, something I may not have meant, and in light of this conversation, inaccurate and most likely insensitive. Not Good, probably, as I seemed to have struck a nerve I hadn’t known was there to strike.”

John just raises his eyebrows higher. It hardly matters if Sherlock meant it or not, the fact that you strike a nerve at all can be just as bad as meaning it to a Holmes, especially if they realize you _know_ you struck a nerve. Embarrassment can be just as horrid as cruelty, if not more so.

“Well,” John says, “whatever you said was definitely Not Good if you shocked him so badly we saw it, that’s for sure.” 

Sherlock scrunches his face at him but doesn’t respond, most likely cautious of reigniting John’s concern of Mycroft, which he must be less than fond of. John sighs, thinking about how it was not so long ago, less than a few months really, that he’d had a danger night, had trailed a finger lovingly across the sharpest knives in the kitchen, over and over and over again, metal glintingly seductive, until Mycroft had eventually shown up and sat watching him until John had stopped. Even if Mycroft lied about why he wanted John to stick around – _it’s what Sherlock would have wanted, John_ – John still feels the familiar itch under his skin that tells him he owes Mycroft, owes him quite a lot, in fact.

“You don’t have to apologize to him, or anything,” John says slowly. “He’s still your brother and I won’t get in the midst of a Holmes dispute. But I reserve the right to be concerned for him, at least.” John frowns tiredly. “I do owe him that much.”

Sherlock nods, presses a kiss to his forehead to show he understands before he wanders back to his violin and begins playing a much more inviting melody. It bids John to let the matter rest, to sit in his chair and tip his head to the ceiling, to stretch his feet out languidly in front of him.

He’s in the same position a week later when Sherlock announces they’re doing a case for Mycroft and that they must go and see him at once as not only is it of national importance but _it’s interesting, John, really it’s practically a nine and you know how I feel about nines, we can’t look a gift horse in the mouth_.

John doesn’t say anything, simply smiles a quiet smile, something beneath his skin itching just a little bit less when Mycroft's umbrella twitches hello.


End file.
